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by At first you would think avatars such as those used on MMORPGs like Second Life, the Sims and World of Warcraft would not have much impact on the real world other than the game play they provide for their actual human players. But what if it could be shown that these avatars leave an environmental footprint larger than actual people in developing countries do? Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life is running about 4000 servers right now to keep between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars “alive”, and they are growing rapidly. How much power does this life support system for the avatars use if we take the middle number of 12,500 avatars on a given day?
If the average PC uses 120 watts, and a server uses 200 watts, plus 50 more for air-conditioning, then (4,000 servers x 250 watts x 24 hours) + (12,500 avatars x 120 watts x 24 hours) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours. That gives a per-capita usage of 60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh. Over a year's time that equates to 1752 kWh per avatar. The average human on a worldwide basis uses about 2400 kWh making each avatar at the present time below the average use. But taking into consideration that people in developing countries use less than 2400 kWh; your MMORPG avatar may be consuming more energy to exist than a real person.
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Am I brain dead or is the math here not entirely sound?
Since no one player is (hopefully) logged in 24/7 I don't think the 1752 kWh per avatar figure counts for much when compared to the 2400kWh per human figure.
Let's say the average player plays for 2 hours a day, every day, while occupying its requisite share of a server (4000 servers / 12500 people at any given time = 0.32 of a server used).
(0.32 server x 250 watts x 2 hours) + (1 PC x 120 watts x 2 hours)= 400 Watts
400 W x 365 Days = 146 kWh per person, per year, for his/her avatar (ends up being 1/12th the original value anyways, I love my wandering mind.)
I'm not sure if my method is completely logical, but it makes more sense to me since people are not on Second Life (or any other MMORPG...I think) all day. If all one needed to survive was to be in "Second Life", then we might as well all move over there now since we would decrease our energy consumption by ~30%!
I really can’t totally defend the logic that was used to get some of the numbers in this. I do think you have a point though; it does seem to be unfair to attribute 24 hours of PC time to avatar energy use. But the server time really does need to be counted because the “life state” of each avatar needs to be maintained 24 hours a day in order to stay “alive”. It could be argued that if Linden labs didn’t exist, the energy draw of their servers and other equipment wouldn’t be there.
Incidentally the same analogy could be made for something like a stock portfolio or something similar. Your stock portfolio (if you have one) could be using more energy than a real person. (Maybe your bank account uses more energy than you.) This article is an interesting concept only because instead of the data being a bunch of boring financial numbers, the stored data is used to resemble a virtual human, and is also of a recreational nature.
Your stock portfolio (if you have one) could be using more energy than a real person. (Maybe your bank account uses more energy than you.)
I think you're thinking about it backwards ... the energy that the "avatars" (actually the servers) use is already part of the calculation that produces the per capita consumption figures:
Consumptionper capita = Consumptiontotal / Population
So, isn't saying that avatars consume 75% as much energy as a person (or 13% if you live in the U.S., where per capita consumption is 13,242 kWh/year) "double dipping" the numbers?
I threw the bank account and stock portfolio idea out there merely as another example of stored data being attributed to a single name. I have no idea what the actual power usage per capita would really be in those cases, although it certainly would be counted in the overall usage numbers as you stated, which leads to only a small percentage of “double dipping” when looking at a single energy use example.
When you try to attribute the power used by each avatar by the method used in the article, it does really present a skewed way of looking at things, because we’re really not comparing apples to apples here. There are really two somewhat separate worlds; the one the avatars “live” in with their limited population inside a subset of ours. Can anyone really believe that if they were to sign on to Second Life anew today, that suddenly an extra 1752kWh would be drawn? At the same time though, the total power of the servers is being drawn from the grid when all is added up. If 10,000 more people were to sign up, then they would have to buy more servers and use more total energy.
Applying “ownership” of energy usage to an avatar which exists merely as stored data is really somewhat silly when you start to think about it. I think that the only real ecological point that can made from this article is in it being a metaphor for the fact that as we become more technological in all aspects of our life, we are going to use more and more energy as a society. By presenting it as “My avatar uses more power than an entire village in Bangladesh”, just adds an imagination capturing slant to the story.
You're definitely right, those numbers would be inflated under the assumption of 24-7 gameplay. However, the "two hour" notion may be an incorrect estimationn of game time. I think it's a fair assessment for traditional games that people play. However, MMORPGs have a more immersive nature that leads the players to be very addicted.
- the Koreans are notorious for being obsessive gamers - one dying after playing 50 hours straight
- my "college" roommate was kicked out after failing five of his classes because of non-stop gaming; I would estimate from 6pm through 2am everyday for a semester
- gold farmers [alluded to in Taxing MMORPGs] clearly play for endless amounts of hours
I think the requirement to pay service fees drives gaming hours UP on this genre. It's like people that pay to work out a gym even though a free one exists. The fact that they shelled out real $$ for it is an incentive to make the maximum use from the expenditure.
my "college" roommate was kicked out after failing five of his classes because of non-stop gaming; I would estimate from 6pm through 2am everyday for a semester
MMORPGs have the same addictive qualities as table top roleplaying. So, I'm not surprised about this. I almost failed out my 4th semester due to table top roleplaying. The 6 PM to 6 AM sessions made it impossible to do homework or show up to my 8:15 class. Not that I wanted to show up to that class anyway, but I needed it for my major.
The fact that they shelled out real $$ for it is an incentive to make the maximum use from the expenditure.
Table-top games have the advantage here. While the manuals can cost around $30, the last time I checked, once you have them only your imagination, and that of the other players, is the limit. The only exception is war gaming, like Warhammer 40k, with the various models that are required for "realistic" play.
I just found a related story on digg.com. EcoIron.com claims that a "black Google" would save 3,000 Megawatt-hours a year.
...an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.
Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. And at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $300,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.
His analysis for the energy savings seems like it is only accurate for CRT monitors and not LCD's, but he does seem to bring up an interesting point. Maybe OmniNerd should go Goth too and help save the world from global warming!
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An obvious solution for a power hungry avatar by stopgap :: NR5 :: on 11 December 2006
That is why those people will be harvested to provide energy for virtual entities such as avatars. If my calculations are correct, a properly reconfigured person from a developing country can provide up to 100W of power yet at the same time gladly relinquishing 2400 kWh of energy thanks to the reconfiguration. At this rate by harnessing the power of their own bodies every single person in a developing country will live a more prosperous and fulfilling life through a virtual avatar.
RE: An obvious solution for a power hungry avatar by Bortnyk :: NR6 :: on 11 December 2006
What if Keanu Reeves tries to wake them up?
RE: An obvious solution for a power hungry avatar by stopgap :: NR5 :: on 11 December 2006
They will be very truly upset with Keanu indeed. Imagine waking up from enjoying a juicy--though virtual--steak and sipping Bloody Marries on an Acapulco beach to having to fetch E.coli infested water from a hole in the ground a mile away and trying to figure out a way to reattach the hand crank to your beta-version OLPC.